The man, who was born Maurice Woodside but now goes by the name “Michael the Black Man,” was seated in the second row of the bleachers behind the podium, where he could be seen on television throughout Trump’s address.

It’s good to hear everyone is okay, SG2. I watched the Weather channel last night and this morning. They were at Buffalo Bayou in Houston and it looks like its getting ready to overflow. But that’s not unusual, it used to happen with a hard rain when I lived there, so I guess they haven’t been doing much work on flood control infrastructure. Amazing, isn’t it, in a country with world class civil engineers?

(CNN)President Donald Trump on Friday directed the military not to move forward with an Obama-era plan that would have allowed transgender individuals to be recruited into the armed forces, following through on his intentions announced a month earlier to ban transgender people from serving.

The presidential memorandum also bans the Department of Defense from using its resources to provide medical treatment regimens for transgender individuals currently serving in the military.
Trump also directed the departments of Defense and Homeland Security “to determine how to address transgender individuals currently serving based on military effectiveness and lethality, unitary cohesion, budgetary constraints, applicable law, and all factors that may be relevant,” the White House official said.

The White House official who briefed reporters on the memo on Friday evening declined to say whether current transgender troops would be allowed to remain in the military under those policy guidelines.

It was a political dynamic so absurd, it’s still hard to believe Republicans pulled it off. During George W. Bush’s presidency, GOP policymakers decided, as Dick Cheney once declared, that “deficits don’t matter.” Republicans put two wars, two tax cuts, Medicare expansion, and a Wall Street bailout on the national credit card – and made no effort to pay for any of it.

Reflecting on the era, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who’s been in Congress since the start of the Carter administration, told the Associated Press in 2009 that “it was standard practice not to pay for things” during Bush’s presidency. A year later, the Utah Republican told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell “a lot of things weren’t paid for” before Barack Obama became president.

And then GOP officials decided everything they’d said and done no longer mattered, and that any attempt to add so much as a penny to the debt was a crime against the American way of life. It was a transparent and ridiculous sham, which much of the political world accepted at face value. After all, voters were told, Republicans were the party of “deficit hawks.”

Now GOP policymakers control the levers of power again, and right on cue, many of the folks who pretended to be concerned about the deficit in the Obama era have decided to drop the facade. Bloomberg Politics reported yesterday:

I’ve never seen so many consistent runs suggesting 40”+ falling in one storm…many prayers to these folks, this is the real deal #Harvey pic.twitter.com/ojfShe7HVm
— Kirk 🌽 Hinz (@Met_khinz) August 25, 2017

AUGUST 22, 2017
No Excuses for a Racist Murderer: W.E.B. DuBois on the Legacy of Robert E. Lee

Historian and civil rights organizer, W.E.B. DuBois, wrote this short essay in 1928.
BY W.E.B. DUBOIS

Each year on the 19th of January, there is renewed effort to canonize Robert E. Lee, the greatest confederate general. His personal comeliness, his aristocratic birth and his military prowess all call for the verdict of greatness and genius. But one thing–one terrible fact–militates against this, and that is the inescapable truth that Robert E. Lee led a bloody war to perpetuate slavery. Copperheads like The New York Times may magisterially declare, “Of course, he never fought for slavery.” Well, for what did he fight? State rights? Nonsense. The South cared only for State Rights as a weapon to defend slavery. If nationalism had been a stronger defense of the slave system than particularism, the South would have been as nationalistic in 1861 as it had been in 1812.

No. People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege, and that was what Virginia fought for in the Civil War. And Lee followed Virginia. He followed Virginia not because he particularly loved slavery (although he certainly did not hate it), but because he did not have the moral courage to stand against his family and his clan. Lee hesitated and hung his head in shame, because he was asked to lead armies against human progress and Christian decency and did not dare refuse. He surrendered not to Grant, but to Negro Emancipation.

Today we can best perpetuate his memory and his nobler traits not by falsifying his moral debacle, but by explaining it to the young white south. What Lee did in 1861, other Lees are doing in 1928. They lack the moral courage to stand up for justice to the Negro because of the overwhelming public opinion of their social environment. Their fathers in the past have condoned lynching and mob violence, just as today they acquiesce in the disfranchisement of educated and worthy black citizens, provide wretchedly inadequate public schools for Negro children and endorse a public treatment of sickness, poverty and crime which disgraces civilization.

It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees and Jefferson Davises will always be tall, handsome and well-born. That their courage will be physical and not moral. That their leadership will be weak compliance with public opinion and never costly and unswerving revolt for justice and right. It is ridiculous to seek to excuse Robert Lee as the most formidable agency this nation ever raised to make 4 million human beings goods instead of men. Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel–not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God.

The Central Intelligence Agency is supposed to be an apolitical agency. Its director is supposed to serve the public’s interest, not those of any party or president. It’s critical to the CIA’s mission that the agency steer clear of partisan disputes, and be recognized – by policymakers and the public alike – as an independent intelligence agency.

But with Donald Trump in the White House, even the most basic functions of the American government have a tendency to be … different.

The New York Times reported a couple of weeks ago that the president’s CIA chief, former Kansas Congressman Mike Pompeo, is “perhaps the most openly political spy chief in a generation – and one of President Trump’s favorite cabinet members.” Trump has turned to the CIA director as an adviser on all kinds of issues unrelated to Pompeo’s duties, including the health care debate.

Overnight, the Washington Post took this quite a bit further, reporting that some CIA officials aren’t sure they can fully trust their own CIA director because of his apparent loyalties to his ally in the Oval Office.

THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 8/24/17Trump looks to loot Afghanistan mineral wealth for US profit
Rachel Maddow shows that what was previously guessed at or darkly assumed about Donald Trump’s intentions toward Afghanistan’s mineral resources has been borne out according to a report that says Trump has assigned the task to Wilbur Ross.

THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 8/24/17Trump helps Taliban with talk of looting Afghanistan minerals
Laurel Miller, former State Department special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, talks with Rachel Maddow about why Donald Trump’s interest in looting Afghanistan’s mineral wealth is harmful to the U.S. mission there.

THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 8/24/17Broad Mueller mandate could mean crisis for Jared Kushner
Rachel Maddow reviews the litany of sketchy deals that have come to light around Jared Kushner, and talks with former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade about how Special Counsel Robert Mueller would likely build a file on Trump campaign associates in the Russia investigation.

THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 8/24/17Pattern of hacking preceded attendee of Trump camp Russia meeting
Rachel Maddow describes some of the past work by Rinat Akhmetshin for his clients and notes that what seems to be a hallmark of his services happened to the DNC shortly after his participation in a meeting at Trump Tower with Trump campaign leaders.

The following is not new. It’s from an essay written by Rebecca Solnit and published back on May 30th: The Loneliness of Donald Trump: On the Corrosive Privilege of the Most Mocked Man in the World. It’s an erudite piece filled with some pretty keen psychological insights. It’s also a revenge piece, written, I suspect, in an effort at self-therapy. If the Trump phenomenon is an unending insult that produces psychic and physical wounds, sometimes it’s healthy (or, at least it seems necessary) to punch back and be mean in return. The value of the piece doesn’t lie in the satisfaction of that impulse. You should read it not for your sanity but because between all the counterpunching, there are opportunities to learn things of value.

The rich kids I met in college were flailing as though they wanted to find walls around them, leapt as though they wanted there to be gravity and to hit ground, even bottom, but parents and privilege kept throwing out safety nets and buffers, kept padding the walls and picking up the pieces, so that all their acts were meaningless, literally inconsequential. They floated like astronauts in outer space.

Equality keeps us honest. Our peers tell us who we are and how we are doing, providing that service in personal life that a free press does in a functioning society. Inequality creates liars and delusion. The powerless need to dissemble—that’s how slaves, servants, and women got the reputation of being liars—and the powerful grow stupid on the lies they require from their subordinates and on the lack of need to know about others who are nobody, who don’t count, who’ve been silenced or trained to please. This is why I always pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation.

You can be a successful and powerful person and fall into this kind of trap quite easily, and it doesn’t require that you’re a raging narcissist. If legitimate competition or simple paranoia causes you to lead with caprice and fear, your subordinates will cease being honest with you. If you’re a child of privilege who has always been shielded from the natural consequences of your excesses, mistakes, and failures, you may not realize that your floor is not sturdy. Your opinion of your capabilities and the defensibility of your position may be dangerously inflated without you needing to have any kind of clinical psychological disorder. Even a child who rose to the top strictly on hard work and merit, like Bill Clinton, can run aground when given too much power and too much deference.

Our current president, however, suffers from than more than the deprivation of sycophancy. He actually requires it.

There is a difference between succumbing to the trappings of power and failing to listen to those who might give you needed reality checks and being the kind of person who is so insecure that they can’t endure any criticism at all.

Our president gives us the worst of all worlds. His behavior cannot be corrected. It is not possible for him to get better advice. His pathologies feed on themselves.

If you believe what Donald Trump and Paul Ryan are saying, you’d think that Obamacare is a disaster that is imploding as we speak. For example, at his town hall forum this week, Ryan said, “Obamacare is not working. We’ve got dozens of counties around America that have zero insurers left. So doing nothing really isn’t an option.”

First of all, it is important to remember that Ryan was referring to the Obamacare exchanges—where about 10 percent of Americans get their insurance. What he’s talking about doesn’t affect the other 90 percent who get their insurance via their employers or a government program. Even with that, Ryan was off by dozens because, of the more than 3,000 counties in this country, there was only one that didn’t have any insurers left in the exchanges. Now there are none.

Hannah Recht provides us with an important update. The last county with no insurers was Paulding County in Ohio. Yesterday, CareSource announced that they will sell marketplace plans there next year. Here is what the coverage map looks like right now for 2018.

Goldman Sachs is now telling their investors that the chances of a government shutdown are fifty-fifty, which is their way of warning that a sharp downturn in the markets could be right over the horizon. But a possible stock market collapse due to a temporarily shuttered government is a fairly small risk compared to the likely result of a default on our sovereign debt if the debt ceiling isn’t raised before the end of September. Another distinction between the two is that there are fallback options if Congress can’t come to a deal on spending. They can pass a continuing resolution that keeps the government operating at current levels and give themselves more time. But they have to raise the borrowing limit or else we won’t be able to pay our bills.

In some sense, we can consider everything optional except the debt ceiling. The Republicans would like to rewrite our tax laws and our health care laws. They have ideas for how to change how the FAA operates and how flood insurance is sold and regulated. They’d like to use the CHIP reauthorization bill to advance some of their agenda. They can, and most likely will, fail at all of these things without it doing much, if any, damage to the economy or the country. Likewise, they’d like to base government spending on their own priorities, not the priorities laid out in President Obama’s last year in office. But if they have to continue the old spending regime to keep the government operating, there’s no real harm in that. They need to reauthorize defense spending, too, and they have some important priorities to advance in that process, too. But they can punt on that if that have to. It’s only the debt ceiling that represents a heart attack-level of seriousness. They can’t fail on that effort.

President Trump is already pre-spinning failure, however.

I requested that Mitch M & Paul R tie the Debt Ceiling legislation into the popular V.A. Bill (which just passed) for easy approval. They…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 24, 2017

…didn’t do it so now we have a big deal with Dems holding them up (as usual) on Debt Ceiling approval. Could have been so easy-now a mess!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 24, 2017

These would not be Trump tweets without lies attached, and it’s absurd to blame the Democrats for “holding up” debt ceiling approval. The Republicans are to blame for needing Democratic votes, but they have majorities and the vote on the debt ceiling cannot be filibustered. Since they do need Democratic votes, they can’t make demands. Even the Trump administration doesn’t think they should make demands. Trump’s problem is that too many Republican officeholders won’t listen to him.

Yet, the meat of Trump’s complaint here is that the Republican leaders didn’t follow his advice and have now created a mess. If this is an attempt to herd the congressional Republicans into passing a “clean” debt ceiling bill, it might make some sense. But it looks more like preemptive blame-shifting than savvy leadership. It might look better if Trump were offering an updated plan, but he isn’t. And the ironic thing is that Trump is giving a pass to the people who are responsible for creating the mess. He blames the Democrats for obstructing and the GOP leadership for ignoring his strategy, which gives comfort to the rank-and-file Republican lawmakers who are the real problem.

For 53-year-old Mavis Wanczyk, the newly minted winner of Wednesday night’s $758.7 million Powerball jackpot drawing, life is about to get crazy. And that might be putting it mildly.

“She better get ready. She’s going to be hit up for investment opportunities, charity requests, even people she knows are going to come to her,” said Jason Kurland, an attorney at Certilman Balin Adler & Hyman, a law firm in East Meadow, New York.

………………………………………

Although Massachusetts law requires lottery winners to be made public, some recipients in the past have created a trust and had a trustee accept the winnings to protect their anonymity.

By choosing to come forward so quickly — the state allows lottery winners a full year to claim their winnings — Wanczyk, of Chicopee, Massachusetts, has already made what many experts would call a mistake by not protecting her identity.

Kurland said the best thing she can do at this point is immediately hire an attorney who can shield her as much as possible from the onslaught of attention she’s in for from money-seekers.

Why Republicans Must Pay for Trump
Donald Trump is already the legitimate leader of just one half of one-third of the country. It’s time for the rest of us to act in concert and do what we need to do.

JOY-ANN REID
08.25.17 12:00 AM ET

Being away from New York and the news cycle for a few days gives you tremendous perspective and a bit of a mental health break, but the facts of our present situation become no less clear with distance from the cable news set. Donald Trump is no less a disaster this week than he was last week. And he will be no less a disaster next week than he is today.
Indeed Trump, lashing out at the media and whipping his audiences into a frenzy of xenophobia and Confederacy nostalgia, is in a sense not the president of the United States. True, he remains installed in office until by the grace of Bob Mueller he is compelled to resign or 2020 brings forward the better angels of American voters’ nature. But he no more leads this nation than a garden gnome grows your hydrangeas. He is an empty figurehead, mentally unraveling on live television and swinging wildly at the ghosts of his accidental victory and certain condemnation by history. To the extent he leads anyone, it’s little more than the same ragged cult of dead enders who’ve always been among us—who’ve swung back and forth between the parties for more than a century and who can’t bring themselves to regard the naked emperor in their midst or face the true meaning of their vote for him.
According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, Trump earns a lopsided disapproval rating of 59 percent, with just 35 percent of Americans applauding the job he is doing. At this stage it makes little sense to wonder what that 35 percent are thinking. Suffice it to say it may be down to pure tribal loyalty. Per Quinnipiac: “[e]very party, gender, education, age and racial group disapproves” of Trump’s performance, “except Republicans, who approve 77-14 percent; white voters with no college, approving 52-40 percent, and white men, who approve by a narrow 50-46 percent.”

In other words, Trump is the leader of approximately one half of one third of the adult population of the United States.

…………………

It therefore falls to the Democrats, the imperfect, often scattered opposition party, to right the ship. This is no time for intraparty perfectionism or partisan protectionism. All who wish to see the Trump circus brought to an end need to focus on doing whatever it takes to put the Democratic Party in charge of Congress on Jan. 1, 2019.

Spandan Chakrabarti
August 25, 2017
For a long, long while, those of us who actually vetted Bernie Sanders from the Left had suspected that Bernie Sanders helped Donald Trump get elected president.

Here at TPV, for example, we pointed out that both Sanders and Trump appealed to a narrow demographic of ‘white working class’ voters (who we now know were motivated by the ‘white’ part in the last election rather than the ‘working class’ part) on the basis of xenophobia – Trump with his anti-immigrant boast and Sanders with a tradephobic message that singled out Latin American and Asian countries as the ones to be afraid of. Both Sanders and Trump failed – or more aptly did not care to – appeal to the broad, vast, diverse swath of America that came from all races, colors, creeds.

Both Trump and Sanders delved into violent imagery, although Trump much more directly so. Sanders did his part with invocation of ‘revolution.’ That revolution is seen by many Americans whose families come from Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa as bloody, violent, and harmful was unseen by Sanders and his loudest supporters. To ignore that rhetoric is hardly better than right wingers claiming that confederate statues and flags are merely historical artifacts.

But until now, those of us who observed this phenomenon lacked hard numerical evidence of Sanders’ culpability in Trump’s ascent to the White House. We now have that evidence.

The 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, a massive undertaking involving 50,000 poll-respondents, finds that fully 12% of Sanders voters in the Democratic primary switched their votes to Donald Trump in the general election. The most important factor that moved Sanders voters into Trump’s court? Again unsurprisingly to critical and objective Sanders observers, that factor was a form of racism – the denial of white privilege.

As soon as Theo Wilson started making YouTube videos about culture and race, trolls using racial slurs started flocking to his page.

After engaging in endless sparring matches in the comments section, Wilson began to notice something curious: His trolls seemed to speak a language unto themselves, one replete with the same twisted facts and false history. It was as if they had all passed through some “dimensional doorway,” arriving from an alternative universe where history, politics and commonly accepted facts had been turned inside out.

There was the idea that slavery was a form of charity that benefited enslaved Africans; that freed blacks owned more slaves than whites before the Civil War; that people of color make up the majority of those receiving aid from America’s safety-net programs; and that investor and philanthropist George Soros is funding protest movements like Black Lives Matter.

Curious about where his trolls were getting their revisionist history lessons, Wilson, 36, — an award-winning poet and actor from Denver — decided to go undercover in their world. In 2015, he started by creating a ghost profile named “Lucious25,” a digital white supremacist who appeared to be an indigenous member of the alt-right’s online echo chamber, he said.

His avatar was John Carter, the Confederate hero of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s science fiction series about death-defying adventures on Mars.

Within a few weeks Wilson’s alternate identity was questioning President Barack Obama’s birthplace, railing against Black Lives Matter and bemoaning people he called “race-baiters,” such as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. After several months, he was a disaffected fixture on alt-right websites that draw white supremacists — such as Info Wars and American Renaissance — and in the comments section of racist YouTube videos

“When Heritage Equals Hate: The Truth About the Confederacy in the United States”
You can click on this link to hear this video:http://video.genfb.com/1677566758941474“Jeffery Robinson, the ACLU’s top racial justice expert, discusses the dark history of Confederate symbols across the country and outlines what we can do to learn from our past and combat systemic racism.”

Just as an example, if you click on number 1 above, “Act”, here is what you will find:

1. Act
Do something. In the face of hatred, apathy will be interpreted as acceptance by the perpetrators, the public and — worse — the victims. Community members must take action; if we don’t, hate persists.

“A hate group is coming to our town. What should we do?”

“I am very alarmed at hate crimes. What can I, as one person, do to help?”

“I find myself wanting to act, to show support for the victims, to demonstrate my anger and sorrow. But I don’t know what to do or how to begin.”

If you’re reading this guide, you probably want to “do something” about hate. You are not alone. Questions like these arrive daily at the Southern Poverty Law Center. When a hate crime occurs or a hate group rallies, good people often feel helpless. We encourage you to act, for the following reasons:

1. Hate is an open attack on tolerance and acceptance.

It must be countered with acts of goodness. Sitting home with your virtue does no good. In the face of hate, silence is deadly. Apathy will be interpreted as acceptance — by the perpetrators, the public, and — worse — the victims. If left unchallenged, hate persists and grows.

2. Hate is an attack on a community’s health.

Hate tears society along racial, ethnic, gender, and religious lines. The U.S. Department of Justice warns that hate crimes, more than any other crime, can trigger community conflict, civil disturbances, and even riots. For all their “patriotic” rhetoric, hate groups and their imitators are really trying to divide us; their views are fundamentally anti-democratic. True patriots fight hate.

3. Hate escalates.

Take seriously the smallest hint of hate — even what appears to be simple name-calling. The Department of Justice again has a warning: Slurs often escalate to harassment, harassment to threats, and threats to physical violence. Don’t wait to fight hate.

>> What Can You Do?

Pick up the phone. Call friends and colleagues. Host a neighborhood or community meeting. Speak up in church. Suggest some action.

Sign a petition. Attend a vigil. Lead a prayer.

Repair acts of hate-fueled vandalism, as a neighborhood or a community.

Use whatever skills and means you have. Offer your print shop to make fliers. Share your musical talents at a rally. Give your employees the afternoon off to attend.

The second-highest ranking member of the Florida Senate pledged a legislative review of a state law that has allowed injured undocumented workers to be arrested and potentially deported rather than paid workers’ compensation benefits.

“Legitimate injuries shouldn’t be denied just because the person was an undocumented immigrant,” said Republican Sen. Anitere Flores, the president pro tempore of the state Senate and chairwoman of the Banking and Insurance Committee.

Hurricane Harvey is looking big and ugly. If you are anywhere near coastal Texas, keep on heading inland and to higher ground. Everyone else, let’s talk health insurance.

If this is the scenario that plays out, people will be kept away from their coastal homes for a week because of the storm and who knows how long due to emergency recovery efforts from the floors, storm surge and wind damage. If that is the case, people with narrow network health insurance will be in a pickle.

Almost all coverage will have an out of area component for emergency services. If an evacuee from the coast has a heart attack in Austin, they will be covered. That is not the concern.

Instead the concern that I have is for urgent but not life threatening emergency care. If an evacuee has an asthma attack and needs to go to an urgent care, that clinic might not be in network although every in-network clinic could be under water. If someone is having a significant anxiety flare-up and needs to talk with a mental health professional and there are no in-network mental health professionals within 100 miles that is currently open, that is a problem. If someone has a tumor where the current course of guideline concordant care is watchful waiting and needs an advanced scan to continue the watchful waiting, the nearest available in-network scanner might be seven counties away.

These are the tough cases of narrow networks in a major, prolonged evacuation. Most people in a short term evacuation will be able to defer their care needs without significant harm. But there are a class of cases which are urgent and should not be deferred but will not qualify as standard emergency care. These are the problems.

If you are in this class of people, the first thing to do is call your insurance company and try to get a pre-authorization. They don’t want to pay out of network prices but they really don’t want to be sued for breach of contract for denying you medically necessary care that their network is incapable of providing. They really don’t want to be highlighted on the 6 o’clock news for doing that. You might not get pre-authorized to the doc that you want but you should get a pre-authorization. Secondly, save the bills. Save all your documentation. Save your notes from the phone calls including the first and last name of the person you talked with, time, date, questions, answers and follow-up questions needed for clarification. If things get messy, a complete contemporary paper trail is a wonderful thing.

Seriously, these MOFOs have it backwards. Call on that POS #45 to stop spreading hate. Write your think pieces on that shit. Write and call out those ignorant voters who roam the countryside spewing their hate in support of this orange POS.

SG2, I’m thinking of you and your family today and praying for your safety. I’m sure you’ll be fine especially with all of you together in one place. The baby is in very good hands. You’ll see him soon.

We might not have nothing left when we come back. We’ve had to start over before and I just can’t take that. I won’t even put any hope in FEMA. We learned the hard way the first time. Thanks for y’alls prayers.

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Even though 3Chics Politico is written and curated by three women: Ametia, Rikyrah, and SouthernGirl2, I must nominate this as one of the most engaging blogs I've found. Devoted to politics and culture, these three shine a light on contemporary life with humor and spirit.